Schuld sind immer die Anderen (2012)

The hot-tempered, criminal teenager Ben has a serious problem. Whenever he loses his temper, he repeatedly lashes out with violent, uncontrolled punches and kicks. He breaks an innkeeper’s jaw when she refuses to sell him any more beer because he is drunk. He kicks the baby in a pregnant woman’s womb to death because she drops the money she had to withdraw from an ATM for him during a robbery. To Ben, it is always other people’s fault. If he weren’t so hot-tempered, nothing would stand in the way of his career as a hired car thief. Instead, he ends up in juvenile detention for assaulting the innkeeper, where he is beaten up and quickly becomes a victim himself. Nobody knows that he and an accomplice also carried out the robbery of the pregnant woman. The case was never solved. His experience as a victim in detention reluctantly leads Ben to try serving his sentence in an open prison. Social worker Niklas gets him out of detention and takes him to the “Waldhaus,” a kind of family-run youth home. Niklas and his wife Eva live at the “Waldhaus” with their five-year-old daughter. The couple use strict rules and hard physical work in the woods and fields to get delinquent teenagers back on the path to responsibility. Just as the experiment seems to be going well for Benjamin, he suffers another setback: Eva, the social worker he had not met at first, returns to the “Waldhaus” from the hospital. Benjamin recognizes her as the victim of his most recent robbery. At first, Ben tries to evade responsibility for what he has done; however, he can no more avoid confronting the other teenagers than he can the brutal face-to-face encounter with his victim, Eva, who understandably acts unprofessionally when she discovers who Ben really is. In doing so, she drives him into the despair she is already in herself. And although Ben eventually regrets what he did, there is no victim-offender mediation. Eva cannot bring herself to forgive the perpetrator.